The Utility and of Gambling of Outcomes: Inconsistent First Approximations

Expected utility versus the changes in knowledge ahead

“…But as Bell (1981) and Loomes and Sugden (1982) implicitly assert, and as explicitly addressed and proved in Pope (1983Pope ( , 1984Pope ( , 2000Pope ( , 2004, von Neumann and Morgenstern had the correct interpretation, namely that EUT excludes secondary satisfactions. Including secondary satisfactions in EUT destroys its axiomatic base of EUT.…”

“…One is to do it from first principles and argue for the reasonableness of including consideration of at least some of them in prescriptive and normative work, e.g. Bell (1981), Loomes and Sugden (1982) and Pope (1983Pope ( , 1984. The second is to argue against the notion that every primary satisfaction is rational, and every secondary satisfaction irrational, by providing instances in which a normative theory might wish to deem irrational some primary satisfactions like urges to overeat, over drink and such like, and deem rational some secondary satisfactions like thankfulness, and ability to commit, e.g.…”

Biases from omitted risk effects in standard gamble utilities

“…Background conditions which are sources of primary satisfactions can be so subsumed. By contrast background conditions which are sources of secondary satisfactions cannot be so subsumed: elaborating outcomes to include secondary satisfactions destroys that theory's axiomatic basis, as also its applicability to multi-stage acts (Pope, 1983(Pope, , 1984(Pope, , 1989(Pope, , 2000.…”

Purity, Resistance, and Innocence in Utility Theory

“…The first article to explore this with some mathematical rigor, although not axiomatically, was Meginniss (1976). There have been later formal, but non-axiomatic, approaches including a temporal analysis by Pope (1984Pope ( , 1995. Meginniss served as an impetus for the much more general-uncertain as well as risky gambles-axiomatic articles of Luce et al (in press a, b) and of Ng et al (in press a, b).…”